I have heard this ever so often that kids (read society) will figure it out and this-is-all-part-of-the-evolution song. Not to be a pessimistic parade on this outlook, but this attitude is not helpful at all. It feels as if the burden of proof is left on someone who has no mental model of this emerging world to figure their livelihood on.
Sure, people say this is how they felt in their teens too, but the wealth inequality now makes many avenues of income less worthwhile.
Kids might still figure out after all; but do not make it sound as if it is no big deal.
This might be obvious but I think the only way forwards is to disengage in services offered by these mega-tech companies. Degoogling has become popular enough to foster open communities that prioritize their time and effort to keep softwares free from parasitic enterprises.
For instance, I am fiddling with LineageOS on a Pixel (ironically enough) that minimizes my exposure to Google's AI antics. That doesn't mean to say it is easy or sustainable, but enough of us need to stop participating in their bad bets to force upon that realization.
Happy Thanksgiving! This is the only site that passes my threshold for signal-to-noise ratio. I genuinely learn from discussions here. It humbles me to be on the same webpage as some of the most knowledgeable, ambitious, thoughtful folks across the globe. Thanks everyone for your active participation.
Let me explain. My belief was that research as a task is non-trivial and would have been relatively out of reach for AI. Given the advances, that doesn't seem to be true.
> And then there's the opinion that for some reason we should 'value' manual labor over using AI, which seems rather disagreeable.
Could you explain why? I'm specifically talking about research. Of course, I would value what a veteran in the field says higher than a probability machine.
I'm increasingly seeing this trend towards bimodal distribution. I suppose that future is quite far off, but the change to that may almost be irreversible.
I don't know how Google Photos stores the photos. Unless you have a backup, it is hard to see if this is a change at the level of files, or that Google Photos has a unique way of storing them that introduces changes to HDR-enabled files. As I said, I'm quoting what worked for people who faced this issue before.
I remember reading this issue on Reddit. Some folks fixed it by installing an older version of Google Photos. I assume you have already tried the usual (deleting cache, reinstalling the app, restarting the phone, checking on the cloud through another device -- the latter might not be possible since you are using without an account).
> So is this a PhD-level intelligence? In some ways, yes, if you define a PhD level intelligence as doing the work of a competent grad student at a research university. But it also had some of the weaknesses of a grad student.
As a current graduate student, I have seen similar comments in academia. My colleagues agree that a conversation with these recent models feels like chatting with an expert in their subfields. I don't know if it represents research as a field would not be immune to advances in AI tech. I still hope this world values natural intelligence and having the drive to do things heavily than a robot brute-forcing into saying "right" things.
Yes, I never understand this obsession for centralized services like Cloudflare. To be fair though, if our tiny blogs anyway had a hundred or so visitors monthly, does it matter if it had an outage for a day?
I can see how it is useful: for some people, reading and writing emails is a dreadful activity. But it is also an important facet of every human activity -- communication. So, it better be intentional and clear. I have turned off all smart features and let me handle how to say what I want to say.
I appreciate this thinking. This gives me the vibes of "let me draw, paint, sing for fun, while AI takes care of my chores". I agree with that, but I can’t help but wonder if the agent ever considers whether things you enjoy should be left to you, but takes everything it can.
Do we need an agent? I get the point of this post: have fun building one because it's easy. But every time I see one of these takes, I keep wondering why do we encourage a tool that would potentially replace us. Why help it build better that could eventually take away what was fun and sustainable income-wise?
I just looked up https://directfile.irs.gov/. While it says closed, the testimonies on this site speak to how easy the filing was. Almost feels like it is intentional to keep rest of the site as is with a small banner on top announcing the closure, as a way to hint at this stupid move by the administration.
YouTube is a marvelous platform. I know how to live life, thanks to the innumerable passionate souls that produced relevant content and put their voice out there. This library of videos never fails to amaze me on how many weird, fun, informative tidbits of humanity it contains. As much as it is a for-profit endeavor, I wholeheartedly support this well managed space.
While I mostly agree with you that it is counterintuitive to have mobile costlier than laptop, this year's Pixel Pro models have 16GB RAM. That is better than most entry level laptops on the market right now.
Air travel is a mixed bag. Inflight entertainment systems, free Wi-Fi (for at least messaging), better airports etc. try to reduce the hassle the system has introduced over the years. But also, the number of personal flights that are delayed by more than an hour was concerning in the recent days. The stipulated times were only a suggestion, and the real time depends pretty much on factors that almost nobody has any control on. The schedules for flights have become so tight that only a perfect world without inconsistencies can handle that dense a network. Throw in the climate change, and it is expected.
Pretty much spot on! It is frustrating to talk with these when they never admit they are wrong. They find new levels of abstractions to deal with your simpler counterarguments and it is a never ending deal unless you admit they were right.
As an academic, I fairly resonate with this message. Also notice that most examples he noticed are from academia/science endeavors. I see academia as probably the only place where slow projects are expected and even encouraged; think of PhD students working on basic science problems, often supported for 5-7 years at end (of course close to minimum wage).
This is not to hide that all slow undertakings are good or anything. Often because of inefficient executions or bureaucratic hurdles, academic suffers. But, I am trying to highlight the observation that how a slow and steady progress is the typical modus operandi for an academic lab/group. A famous saying comes to mind: Rome isn't built in a day.
I'm amazed at the short-sighted nature of this late-stage capitalistic world. A company like Meta which makes its fortune via insane amount of anti-user policies gets to earn a revenue of $164B with a profit of over $62B. A scientific organization that benefits everyone in so many innumerable ways, something that serves as a champion of humanity cannot be allowed to maintain a budget of $25B a year. Shut everything, let us bow to our AI overlords!